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tony3d

macrumors 6502
Apr 6, 2006
377
2
I have owned a Mac Pro since around 11/2012. It is a 12-core 3.06 with a 512GB SSD and an ATI 5870 and two 27" ACDs.

I have been extremely happy with this machine. No, it wasn't inexpensive, but the build quality, reliability, performance, and versatility are top notch.

I hear many complain that the technology is "2009" technology, which may be true to an extent, but it was top of the line 2009 technology.

The fact it can run so many OSs is very attractive for me.

As far as I know (I have tried many) the machine will run the following native without virtualization:

OS X 10.6.4+
OS X 10.7.x
OS X 10.8.x
Windows XP SP2/3
Windows Vista x86/x64
Windows 7 x86/x64
Ubuntu
Solaris
ESXi 5.1

With the fit and finish of the case, the power of the Xeons and the expandability with 128GB of RAM, I must say I have been extremely happy with this machine.

I am not a gamer, so I don't use it for such tasks, but I am sure it would do just fine if one wanted to - especially if one put a newer GPU in it, but that would cut off the OS X options so I am not up to doing that just yet.

I also see many 1,1 models to 4,1 models in use, and that is very impressive. I certainly would not hesitate to buy another one (older/refurb) as a second machine.

When the 6,1 is released, I hope they do not change the design of the machine. That is one thing I love about it. I hope they keep the two optical bays.

The only things I would wish for would be the additional of USB 3.0 standard, Thunderbolt, and newer EFI version to boot Windows 7 x64 native EFI, but these are very minor issues and do not affect my opinion of the current machine.

I have the same machine as you with 32gigs of ram the 5870, and all drive bays full. I love this machine for the 8 months I have had it. The only thing I really would like to add is a USB 3.0
Card. I use it primarily for rendering in Lightwave 3d. I am very glad I opted for the 3.06 12 core. It blows away my aging 2008 8 core which is still going strong. Gave it to my son who upgrade the ram to 24gigs, and just ordered a Saphire 7050. It was doing pretty well with games, and the 5770, so I expect the 7950 should really help his cause especially in Windows. Yup, have no complaints here. Love my new Mac Pro. Waiting to see what new video cards ship with the new Pro before upgrading it.
 

Tesselator

macrumors 601
Jan 9, 2008
4,601
6
Japan
Hi. How do you like 11.5? Just bought LWCad after upswing Lightwave for about 10 years. Wow! Great plugin. Don't know how I lived without it.

Well, of course I love it. But then again my name is in the credits so I'm pretty biased! :)

And yup, LWCad is a very nice addition! Speeds up modeling a lot!
 

FluJunkie

macrumors 6502a
Jul 17, 2007
618
1
I'm in love with my Mac Pro. It's a 5'1 model, bought a year or two back once my Macbook Pro had reached the point where it was too slow and accumulating too many "quirks" to be workable as a primary machine. The last tower I owned before that was a Power Tower Pro 250 back in the Mac OS clone days - after that, I switched to the Powerbook/Macbook Pro line of laptops.

However, having hit a considerable number of problems that were inherent to the laptop form factor (mediocre GPUs, low RAM, etc.) I decided to go with a Mac Pro.

Right now, I'm running with an SSD for Boot, and the other drive bays filled with a separate Windows drive, a data drive, and a clone backup of the data and boot drives. The GPU is a 5870, and I've got...24 GB of RAM, and am eyeing an upgrade to that. The thing is an absolute workhorse, and has ably gotten me through my dissertation research. The sheer amount of power in it, the combination of an excellent, polished UI and playing nicely with lots of UNIX-based libraries and programming languages (R, Python, etc.)...<3
 

DawgBone

macrumors newbie
Jan 17, 2013
27
0
I do some work with neural networks and genetic algorithms. I recently got a MP 3.1 and upgraded the CPU to dual, quad-core 3 GHz Xeons. Right now I'm shopping for a used, high end Nvidia GPU.

For less than $1000 I will have a very decent CUDA and OpenCL machine which will be perfect for programming work in these two areas.

Incredible value! I am very pleased.
 

kudukudu

macrumors regular
Oct 24, 2007
198
4
pretty happy with mine. You can see the details in my sig. I had some 3rd party memory that died at which point that was covered under a lifetime warranty. I am pretty happy that I have a 5 year old machine that is still running as well as the day I bought it. I can't imagine moving to an imac. I am hoping to keep this sucker for another 3-5 years before upgrading.
 
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